Pixels from the Edge

De-Branding Myself

So here I am, I’m 32 years old and I’ve been on the web forever, shit before the web even really existed I was gophering German university FTP servers for pictures of Claudia Schiffer. And what do I have to show for myself now, for all my years of online service? Who the hell am I online? londonstreetlife? Really??? Now that I can finally see it for what it is, it really is all kinds of lame. A buddy of mine got an iPhone last year and my phone broke so he lent me his old phone, he was all about keeping that sweet sony walkman phone in good condition incase he ever needed it again, which included leaving it in some orange case to keep it safe, I thought it was ugly but I was like whatever, I needed a phone. Then one day at the bar he sees me with the phone in the case and all he can say is ‘I never realized how much of a fool I looked going around with that phone!’ And that’s just about where I’m at right now, I’ve seen myself in the mirror carrying that lame ass phone in that ugly ass case, except it’s not a phone it’s my online brand, and it’s way lamer than that phone in that case ever was.

Lame-ass phone in ugly-ass case

I am a Techie

In fairness to myself there is a history behind “londonstreetlife”. See originally I was just a kid screwing around online, flaming and win-nuking in the chat rooms, and I fancied myself as a bit of a hacker dabbling in some buffer overloading and shit. And at the time I was just “streetlife”, and as a nick back then it worked, everyone had handles like that. And to be honest I think I could still work with that name if I’d managed to hang onto it, shit streetlife alone would be way dope. But back then it was like $70 to buy a domain name and I didn’t even have money to get myself a snack, and that $70 was a reoccurring annual fee, and besides no one back then was thinking to buy their own friggin TLD. And as the years went by streetlife.com was snapped up, but I didn’t care I just threw a “london” on the front, that was cool I was living in Spain and that was a throwback to the streets where I was from. And it seemed to work and I just went with it, and I didn’t think about it again…

I am a Creative

But over the last year or so I’ve taken a journey to embracing my creative side. Really I always had my foot in the creative door but my mind was firmly stuck in the techie room. It took a lot of self reflection on my part to get here, and it wasn’t easy, but thanks to the respect and support of some great creative leadership at my agency, believing in my creative talents, I’ve finally landed. For a while there I was extremely confused, I didn’t know where I was at. I was promoted to ACTD (Associate Creative Technology Director) at work, and suddenly I felt somewhat ostracized from the Technology department but yet I didn’t feel like I was part of the Creative department either. It didn’t help that I now reported to both departments, and I ended up feeling like I didn’t belong to either, marooned somewhere in between. I saw the movie Tropic Thunder and there’s a line where Robert Downey Jr’s character says “I’m the dude playing the dude disguised as another dude”, and at first I laughed cos it’s funny but then I realized that was sort of how I would describe myself and it was kind of depressing. But I ended up understanding that I am creative, and I am also technology, and the fact that I found myself so lost in identity was more the fault of the agency and the industry. See the future of web development is the merging of both those departments, and the agency has taken a great step towards reaching that goal by creating the first cross-over role, and it is now up to me to prove it works and let the rest of the agency catch up.

A dude playing a dude disguised as another dude

I am a Brand

So now that I finally embraced myself as a creative it was apparent that my brand wasn’t working, or even that I barely had one. See a techie is in the background, it doesn’t matter what your brand is, you don’t really get to have one. When you’re interviewing for a tech job none of it matters, they care about your expertise, coding skills, your work ethic and your ability to hit deadlines. None of that can be captured in a brand or a portfolio, therefore you have to produce code samples and references to look good and get hired. But when you’re a creative it’s entirely the opposite. A creative is in the spotlight, a creative represents the agency and the clients brand, a creative’s name goes on the awards and is talked about in the press releases. So if you aren’t able to brand yourself well then how can an agency trust you with a clients brand? If you don’t even know yourself well enough to define your own creative brief then how can you be be capable of capturing the essence of your clients? And if you don’t have the skill set or the drive to effectively execute and produce results when it comes to your own brand then how can you expect an agency to put their clients image in your hands?

But what brand am I?

So I’ve tasked myself with the challenge, and the project “my brand” is well under way, I’m energized and more excited about this than I have been about any project in a long time. Shit finally I get to find out who I am. Coming soon to a browser near you. Summer 2009. Watch this space!

Posted August 4th, 2009

Tags: Best Business Practices, Branding, Digital Advertising, Social Media, Web Design | 4 Comments »

iPhone App Interactive Ad Banner

I was sitting on the sofa the other night watching the Tigers suck and I came across an interesting ad served up within TwitterFon on the iPhone. Leaving aside the fact that I still use TwitterFon over the much lauded Tweetdeck (it scrolls down to your oldest new tweet which is a truly priceless feature), I noticed the following ad banner:

Apart from it being an automotive ad which is the industry I have been involved in now for a number of years, the peel-behind icon in the top right corner really stuck out. It represents ads by VideoEgg who coincidentally we’d just had in the office a month or so ago giving us a presentation. I was impressed with the company’s ad model and portfolio, and found Mark Spates, their Director of Social Media Strategy, quite an exceptional guy. But this post isn’t about VideoEgg even though I realize now thinking back that I have a lot to say about them, so maybe I’ll do that another time. Anyways, I knew from their ad model that they don’t charge per impression or click-through, but for the time spent actually interacting with the ad, which leads them to produce some really interesting and engaging content, so whilst I am not in the market for a Prius I clicked through to see what it was all about.

And I was really wowed. Twitterfon peeled back to reveal behind it what I came to realize was a full-blown microsite, shit this thing was as good as some of the lower budget reveal sites we’d put out on the web two or three years ago. But this was in an ad, in an app, in my cellphone, in my hand, while I sat on the sofa watching the Tigers suck. Of course it wasn’t really as good as any microsite we’d put out two years ago, but for the reasons I just mentioned it felt like it was. And also up until now all the iPhone App banner ads I’d seen have been tasteless unsightly garbage, offering me something along the lines of a free Katie Perry song if I download some dodgy app, reminding me of the exact same problem we had on the web when ad banners first came about, the horrible junk that they were, and the iPhone is meant to be a mobile platform that isn’t a throwback to the nineties.

Okay so you click the VideoEgg symbol to launch the interactive experience:

And revealed behind the App is the microsite:

This homepage loads instantly, and as you see it’s pretty simple stuff, which is what I like. In fact it’s what most of us like, as this article which is a little dated but still stands true points out – web users are getting more ruthless – if you’ve got a gallery to show me, some videos, or any other interesting piece of content then sweet, I dig it, bring it on. But don’t dick me around and waste my time with your bloated over-designed over-engineered Flash (or whatever technology) app that takes forever to load, and then every time I interact with it starts with its bullshit animations and transitions, which appear to only exist to cover up the fact that it provides absolutely nothing of worth or value to me, only to discover that you need a PhD in rocket science, be a level 60 sorcerer in world of warcraft, and quite possibly even be slightly retarded to boot, just to figure out how to interact with it.

Well that’s not this, this is simple. And my time is precious, and me is ruthless, and me like it lots.

There’s a gallery with about a dozen interesting shots:

There’s a vehicle colorizer:

And finally you can watch some of their tv spots:

As this ad was served up with TwitterFon it would be an obvious move to improve upon it by having some kind of Twitter tie-in, but only if it improves upon the experience and not just so it can claim to incorporate the latest fad of the week, and lets not forget that this ad is likely served up into a wide assortment of apps belonging to the VideoEgg network so the experience needs to be generic to all of them.

Look I’m not saying this ad was some truly amazing experience, really my only point is that it reminded me that this is how all iPhone ads should already be, and I’m pleasantly surprised to see that some of them already are.

Posted August 1st, 2009

Tags: Digital Advertising, iPhone, Mobile Devices | 1 Comment »

I Am Creative

I’ve only really come to terms with this fact over the past year. For the longest time I was confused about the issue and during my teen years had built up a stigma around the whole idea of me not being creative. See I went to school with some really awesome creative talent, guys that went on to graduate with honors from schools like the Royal College of Arts, and are now illustrators for respected newspapers and magazines, top architects in their field, and producers of music videos for some of the worlds top recording artists. And back then in high school I just couldn’t compete with that, so I didn’t. And then these guys went to their fancy art schools and I went off to tech college, and when we met back up in the summers they’d become real anal artsy types (not so much my old school boys but the friends they’d made), the kind that know everything about everything and try and belittle those who aren’t as privileged with their education. They’d ask me who my favorite artist was and I’d say “Picasso” and they’d snicker and call him main stream and mouth-off like 100 more artists I’d never heard of. Well guess what douche bags, I’ve now been to art galleries all over the world and I’ve seen the artwork of all your fancy artists first hand, and I still think Picasso fuckin rocks. If I could be there right now I’d tell them something like 83% of this planets population has never even seen a snowflake, and 43% of the world has never tasted butter. I don’t know whether that has any relevancy here but it just seems damn appropriate. In fact I’d just tell them to go with their sheep, even though remembering myself back then I probably threatened to bop them on the nose which I’m sure didn’t help the situation much. Anyways what I’ve eventually come to realize, and it’s taken me a long-ass time, is that Gustav Eifel architect of the Eifel Tower and the Statue of Liberty probably couldn’t paint for shit, and Michaelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel but he probably couldn’t sculpture a damn. Or maybe they could. But my point is that I’ve accepted that while I can’t design I can definitely creatively direct.

I’m a cool CAT
Okay maybe I’m letting it get to my head a little but I’m not letting it make me big headed. Allow me to self indulge for a moment as I step out of the creative closet. I’m Creative And Technology, and whilst I myself have only recently come to terms with this, others have known for much longer. I was hired into the agency as an engineer to bridge the gap between the Technology and Creative departments (that should have been a big clue right there). And when I first got here designers would thank me for making the build-out match the comp exactly, which I always thought was weird, like isn’t that my job? Sure it was my job but no one told the other engineers that. See there was a perception in the Engineering department that an engineers primary job was to build out the functionality, and then secondary was the design, and getting it vaguely similar to the comp was more than acceptable. Shit back then the designers weren’t even allowed to talk directly to the engineers, my managers would be pissed that I’d have designers in my office. It wasn’t part of the process, it wasn’t in the project plan, the process was more important than the product. Well shit I’d say, it’s part of my process and my project plan and I’ll be here till midnight getting it right if I have to, and if the product isn’t the most important thing then what the hell are we all doing here? And if Creative ever came at us with something new, something we’d never done before, well the MO of the Engineering department was to say we didn’t do that and reject it, but I was like hell yes bring it on and I’d figure it out – research it, learn it, create it. And if I ended up realizing it was impossible I wouldn’t go back to them with “No”, see I lived by a mantra I’d picked up at a former employer – “Offer alternatives not obstacles”, and I’d go back to the Creative Director with other options, alternatives I’d come across or dreamed up while researching. And more often than not they’d go with it, and you know what? Sometimes we’d look at it after and think it was better than the original direction. That’s right, ideas I was having were making their way into the design and I didn’t even realize what was happening, see I was like the ugly duckling on the Engineering team, I was a maverick and a trouble maker and I didn’t fit in, but when I went downstairs to the Creative floor I was popular and I thought it was just because they liked me, I didn’t realize it was because they saw me as one of their own. And all along I was a fuckin white swan with the rest of them, just that they could see it but I couldn’t.

There’s a million more examples and stories I could talk about during my journey to get here. And maybe I haven’t even picked the best examples to tell you but I’ve made my point. Earlier this year I was promoted to ACTD – Associate Creative Technology Director, the first one the company has ever had. Shit they created a position for me and I still didn’t get it. I saw it as an honorary position, like a lifetime career achievement award at the Oscars, acknowledgment that the actor had given a lot but had never been great enough in a single moment to win the big prize. And when it was announced I had Creative Directors telling me it should have happened a long time ago and yet I still saw it as more of a pat on the back, a thanks for all your help and hard work. See I was still screwed up in the head, those damn college art students still messing with my mind, the Engineering department making me feel less than worth for caring too much about the quality of my product, me still not understanding what it means to be creative, my own insecurities of my abilities.

So how did I snap out of it? In the end it’s really quite simple. I started working on putting together a portfolio site. And that entailed getting together all the work I’d produced over the long years all in the one place for the first time. And it then involved thinking about that work I’d done and doing write-ups on it, and those write-ups involved looking at that work and actually taking credit for what was rightfully mine. And that’s how I realized it, by going back, all the way back to the beginning, I was and had always been responsible for creating some kick-ass shit. Sometimes it was kick-ass technology, and sometimes it was kick-ass creative, and more often than not it was both, shit I develop websites for a living so is there really a difference? I realized everything I’d done, just about everything I’d touched was for the better because of it, because of me. I realized there’s no shame in being creative without being able to design, all those ideas that I’d thrown out there that had made their way into the wire frames, into the comps, into the products. Yes if I hadn’t had that idea the design would have still rocked because the designer was a rock star, but the product wouldn’t have been as good. And there’s nothing wrong with giving a designer direction even though you don’t have the skills to design yourself. No I can’t start with a blank canvas, I don’t know how to use Photoshop effectively and I don’t understand all the theory behind the hue and saturation and such, but give me a starting point and I can take it from there, show me a design and I’ll give good advice and critique, I’ve proven this to myself and my peers many times over, and they respect me for it and finally I respect myself. I now know there are kick-ass designers that can’t creatively direct, just as there are copy writers that can’t design for shit but can creatively direct. And I now know there are techies that can creatively direct too.

Posted July 29th, 2009

Tags: Digital Advertising, Web Design | 3 Comments »

More Augmented Reality

Our team recently had the agency’s first stab at the Augmented Reality craze that’s going down lately. We launched this a few weeks back. We didn’t have much of a budget at all so it’s no great masterpiece and we’re relying on our target audience (8-18 years) not having been previously exposed to the technology, so hopefully they’ll find it fresh and fun. Basically the packaging and magazine ads have the image needed for the experience, we’re not promoting it in any way, it’s just a ~~viral~~ seeded campaign. Here’s a neat example of how it works:

For the most part it seems many of the implementations of this technology so far have been very gimmicky, though I just recently came across the USPS Package Simulator which is the first practical usage of the technology I’ve seen. Of course as practical as it seems to be, its real world usefulness could be limited which could land it back in the gimmick column, I don’t send packages ever so I just don’t know.

Gaming so far seems to be the best way to highlight this technology. And I really love what Topps has done, in a time when the baseball trading cards industry was in serious decline due to modern day gaming, they found a way to marry their product with gaming, by using the augmented reality technology. I’ve yet to try it out for real, though I keep telling myself I’ll buy a pack of baseball cards next time I’m at the 7-11. It looks really fun (as in innocent, simple fun), I hope it’s helping turn the industry around. Checkout the instructions and watch the video below:

Another game I’ve come across, which is breaking away from the confines of the desktop, is a Tegra Zombie game. I won’t go into it much, if you haven’t seen it yet it’s pretty amazing, just watch the video:

I can picture this taking place on a huge scale, the size of a football field or bigger, with hundreds of gamers walking around with the device in their hands, all connected wirelessly in one giant game! And better yet the devices wouldn’t be hand held but tv goggles, and the buildings and zombies would be life size! It’s really not that far away folks, in fact Jobs and Gates probably play this shit already in each others basements!

Of course all this isn’t really true augmented reality, it is to an extent, but it’s limited to a certain environment and true augmented reality lives in the real world. This type of technology has just started coming out recently thanks to mobile devices with built-in camera, GPS, compass, and fast internet that are capable of placing what they see with pinpoint accuracy. I can barely imagine what’s to come, what’s currently being developed, or even what currently exists in some mad scientists laboratory. But check the following video out if you haven’t already. It’s a true augmented reality app released by IBM for Android phones for people wandering around at the Wimbledon tennis club. With the entire Wimbledon complex tagged and hooked up to monitors you can look through your device and see what’s going on around you with supplemental information. I think what really blew me away was the fact you can look across the lawn club and see where all the restrooms are and it even shows you how long the lines are so you can make sure you join the one with the shortest wait!

Posted June 25th, 2009

Tags: Augmented Reality, Flash, Mobile Devices, Web Apps | No Comments »

Video Slideshows With Animoto

Researching for a client recently I came across a neat little service called Animoto. The problem we had was needing a photo gallery that lives on a single page. Not a huge problem in itself and any of these would work, or numerous others I’ve worked with or built over the years. But the issue here is the CMS we have to work with doesn’t have the ability to upload media, this has to be done separately via FTP, so it’s a messy process and not ideal to leave in the hands of the account team. So I figured the best option would be to find some third party service that we could embed, the files would live on a remote host and eliminate the need to upload files to our server. So naturally I thought Flash would be a good fit for this and pretty quickly found myself at Animoto.

Dubbed “The end of slideshows” Animoto is a very tidy web application that instantly creates fun little video slideshows of a photo gallery. It is very clean and easy-to-use, comprising of two simple steps – upload images and pick a background song (you can pick from a simple selection of provided songs or upload your own), and a then just wait out a few minutes of rendering time. Within minutes I’d created a neat little video slideshow of my boy, shown above. It’s free to create a short 30 second video (12-15 photos recommended), and $3 to create a full length video or $30 for an unlimited amount for a full year and for $5 per video you can download it DVD quality. There’s also a professional license for $249 per year which gives you everything included at no extra charge as well as allowing a call-to-action button, white labeling the video, free commercially licensed music, and of course all the videos you make are approved for commercial use.

And once you’ve created the video it’s available to post to any social media (using Clearspring) or embed in your blog. And you can create a remix, which can be a one-click automatic process, or you can edit the remix – revolving images, adding text, spotlighting, as well as adding or deleting images. This is the one-click remix I made of the above video:

It wasn’t the ideal product for us to use for this particular project, but I was very impressed with the concept and the execution and it’s something I will be keeping in mind for the future. For personal use I think I could have a lot of fun with it – converting family photo albums, and work party or street barbecue photo mashups, and the fact it comes as an iPhone app and I can instantly create the videos from my photo reel on-the-go, as well I have all the ones I’ve previously created with me at all times, is pretty awesome.

Posted June 18th, 2009

Tags: Flash, iPhone, New Dad, Social Media, Web 2.0, Web Apps | No Comments »

Automatically Rotating Homepage Takeovers

Something going on at Pandora that I came across today really struck me. They’re automatically rotating homepage takeovers as you interact with the site. It makes sense really, it’s a radio station so you load it up, minimize the browser and forget about and the songs play on and on, and therefore there’s no point in showing ads. So when they know you’re looking at the page, on interaction, is when they start showing ads (and try and get some revenue for the amazing service they offer for free).

Just in case you are not familiar with the term ‘homepage takeover’, it’s advertising talk for when a homepage is taken over by an advertisement. I think historically it was more of a roadblock, which is when there’s an obnoxious overlay and you have to click ‘close’ to continue browsing the site, but these days it can also be when the entire page is branded (or rather co-branded) with a product. A good example is this ask.com homepage from a few weeks back that was branded with a movie which quite possibly has the longest title of all time:

So back to the Pandora website. I was initially fascinated to see this going on, that when I interacted with the site these big colorful and sometimes animated backgrounds were changing. This is something I’m used to seeing change on a page load, as I navigate from page to page, or at least refresh the page I’m on. But really what’s happening with Pandora is it’s a self contained web application, so the page itself doesn’t change but the content within tabbed navigation areas gets updated. The core of Pandora is actually a Flash app, though it’s contained within HTML, the footer is in HTML for example, and so are the ads I’m talking about here. I’m sure this is a model that will be adopted by self contained web apps that bring content to the user instead of the other way around, if it hasn’t been already.

So here’s a few examples I came across:

The Black Eyed Peas example above is probably the most visually stunning I saw.

Vitamin Water looks good.

Some Microsoft ad, not really appealing to me. This also shows an example of an inline ad badge within the playlist (Alltel).

Canon Power Shot above, it’s alright, and has an interactive movie area (which pauses the radio station). This also shows how the Alltel ad badge moves along as an item in the playlist.

Posted June 10th, 2009

Tags: Digital Advertising, Web Design | 2 Comments »

Comic Effect using PHP GD

For some reason I decided I wanted to create a comic-ized image of myself from a photo. I think initially I wanted it to create myself some sort of digital avatar, but in the end it was out of pure obsession. See I figured it was a really normal thing to want to do and I’d find a bunch of free websites out there where I could upload a photo of myself and it would convert it. Not so (admittedly I was searching from ‘comicize’ when I think the correct term is more like ‘posterize’), there are some sites out there that do it but they’re pretty lame. In my mind I was looking to do something along the lines of A Scanner Darkly to a photo of myself. I was so convinced it was such a normal thing to want to do that I started researching how to do it in code. There’s a lot of websites out there explaining how to do it in Photoshop but nothing in code. So after an hour reacquainting myself with the PHP GD library I was all set and ready to do it, and I realized I didn’t have a clue how to actually achieve this. So after some messing around I came to the conclusion that GD just isn’t powerful enough, and there’s something new called ImageMagick that is way more powerful and seems like it really has the capabilities to pull something like this off. Except it’s not really available for Windows yet and it isn’t installed on my Linux box, and I’m way too impatient to switch gears and work on getting it installed before I continue of my quest to comicize a photo. So I found this tutorial which is showing how to achieve the look in some old software, it seems to do a fairly good job at a basic level, so I figured if I could replicate that in PHP I’d at least satisfy myself for the time being.

Step 1
Just as the tutorial says, the first step is to open the image.

<?php
$imgName="beard.jpg";
$imgSource = imagecreatefromjpeg($imgName);
?>

Step 2
The second step is to create the black and white canvas, using getimagesize() to size it to the original photo.

<?php
list($w,$h)=getimagesize($imgName);
$imgK=imagecreatetruecolor($w,$h);
?>

Step 3
The third step is the most complicated. Unlike the application used in the tutorial which has a nice interface, we have to create the code to do this ourselves. We loop through every pixel of the source image and compare its tone. This was the only variable in the code I had to tweak to match the example image in the tutorial. The RGB sum image can add up to a total of 765 (255*3). I played around and found that 300 was pretty much an exact match to the “Threshold Level” of 104 called out in the tutorial, this value may change depending on the contrast of the source image. So in the code if the sum of the RGB value is above 300 we allocate a white pixel to the coordinate, otherwise we allocate to it a black pixel.

<?php
for($y=0;$y<$h;$y++){
  for($x=0;$x<$w;$x++){
    $rgb = imagecolorat($imgSource, $x, $y);
    $r = ($rgb >> 16) & 0xFF;
    $g = ($rgb >> 8) & 0xFF;
    $b = $rgb & 0xFF;
    $bw=$r+$g+$b>300?imagecolorallocate($imgK,255,255,255):imagecolorallocate($imgK,0,0,0);
    imagesetpixel($imgK,$x,$y,$bw);
  }
}
?>

Step 4
Just like in the tutorial, in step 4 we merge the black and white image over the original with an opacity of 40%. We’ll also use this step to write out the image to the browser (sending the correct headers also).

<?php
imagecopymerge($imgSource,$imgK,0,0,0,0,$w,$h,40);
header("Content-type: image/png");
imagepng($imgSource);
?>

The dark shadows help give the image more shading, and the white layer helps smudge and tone down the number of colors that the original photo had, both of which contribute to a more comic-ish effect. It’s worked out quite well with this image when using the exact same settings as created replicating the tutorial, but testing it out on other images it’s obvious it all needs to be adjusted on a case by case basis, and as the tutorial points out, this technique only really works well with faces.

Anyways this has been a taste at something I’ve never tried before. For a long time I’ve thought about what makes up an image, where the light and colors come from and how they all work together to make or break and image. It’s all very interesting and I am eager to pickup Photoshop and really start learning how to do some usefull effects, and install imageMagick and replicate what I’ve learnt in my code.

Posted June 3rd, 2009

Tags: PHP, Web Apps | 2 Comments »

My Site Added to the Wordpress Showcase

This was a pretty cool thing that happened to me this week. A site I built earlier this year www.thefordstory.com got added the the Wordpress Showcase! See for yourself – http://wordpress.org/showcase/the-ford-story/.

This is especially cool for me for two reasons. Firstly it talks about how it recognizes Fords choice to use Wordpress a social media medium, which is something I myself fought hard to make a reality – PHP is not a language we have previously supported as an agency and in the short time we had to build the site some questioned whether we were biting off more than we could chew, and rightly so, but I felt it was important to move ahead and embrace Wordpress which has become the industry standard for blogging. And secondly because “Ford’s use of WordPress as a CMS is also well done and features a seamless integration of static content, videos, photos, and dynamic updates.”, so the site has been showcased because of the code and functionality, and as the architect of it and the guy that built out the custom plugins I am especially proud. I’ve been involved in awards before, but they’re almost always for creative and design, so this one feels a lot more technical and a lot more personal. Except it’s not an award!

Of course there were many people involved in making this site a reality and we all worked hard in a short space of time to make it happen, so well done to all!

Actually it’s funny too because when it was first announced I was getting emails from all avenues – account, project management, and team leads telling me the good news. And I’m like errr, I already know, Wordpress emailed me directly about it, I’m the one that submitted it!

Posted May 28th, 2009

Tags: WordPress | No Comments »

Microsoft Tag: A Mobile Tagging System

A colleague of mine sent this my way http://www.microsoft.com/tag/. It’s a fairly new beta service that Microsoft is playing around with called Tag. Coincidentally it’s in a similar vain to something I am currently working on, Augmented Reality, which we’ll be launching later this week. Anyways back to the point, I love it when something that should be complicated is super easy to use, and that’s what I love about this. It took no longer than 10 minutes from receiving the link in an email to having a printout in my hand that launches my blog when my iPhone app points to it, and that time included reading up on it, creating the tag, and downloading the iPhone app. So obviously I can’t spend more than 10 minutes blogging about it!

In a nutshell it creates a visual “bar code” that its accompanying mobile app is able to recognize and react to. There are four Tag types to chose from which you pick when creating the tag, they all look the same but react differently upon scanning:

- URL – Takes the user to a web address. Would work just about anywhere – print or TV.
- Free Text – Sends a free text to the user. Would be ideal for magazine coupons, instead of having to cut it out, just scan to get it sent to your cellphone.
- vCard – Sends a mobile business card to the user. Ideal for an email signature, and obviously an actual business card, doh!
- Dialer – Automatically dials a phone number. Could be handy to just scan the menu and have it auto dial your favorite carry-out restaurant.

So I created a tag that links to my blog:

Download the app from http://gettag.mobi and point your mobile camera to my Tag. It seems the app is available for all mobile platforms, I’m on the iPhone and was redirected to iTunes to download it. You can print off the tag and scan it, or just scan it straight off the screen (this will be sweet for video!), it doesn’t hang around either, as soon as it recognizes the tag it just takes you straight there.

Now you’ve seen it in action create one yourself. It’s simple:

1. Login using you Windows Live ID

2. Create your Tag

3. Render the graphic

It seems you can customize the Tag to make it more brand specific, though I haven’t investigated this. There’s also some cool reporting functionality, now marketers can track the success rate of individual print and TV ads.

Okay so I just did a little research (which takes this post over the 10 minute mark!) and I guess this technology entirely original, and something similar called QR Code has been in effect for a number of years and is commonly used in Japan. In fact now that I see a sample image I definitely recognize it from different packaging I have seen over the years. Some people out there have tried to suggest Tag is just Microsoft trying to re-invent the wheel, but I would say this technology has a different goal in mind, to the QR Codes at least. An apparent Pro that the QR Code appears to have is more like a Con from how I’ve been looking at the technology – that it contains the information about it’s content embedded within it, so it doesn’t require a third party gateway to do a look-up and return instructions. But because of this the image is physically dependent on the instructions contained within it, whereas with the Tag technology it appears the image can be quite customized to match a brand or campaign regardless of what it does, and the gateway look-up guarantees being able to track all the interactions. And another plus with a gateway look-up is being able to change the images response (many times over) once it’s published.

Posted May 26th, 2009

Tags: iPhone, Mobile Devices, Web Apps | 2 Comments »